Stream It Or Skip It?

When a pair of ruby red slippers from The Wizard Of Oz were stolen in 2005, it was big news, mainly because the slippers are such an important part of American film history. But did you know that the shoes didn’t resurface until 2018? A new documentary takes a look at this unusual case.

The Gist: Ruby Red Handed: Stealing America’s Most Famous Pair Of Shoes, directed by Andy Awes, is a documentary about the confounding case around the 2005 theft of a pair of Judy Garland’s ruby red shoes from The Wizard Of Oz. Maria Awes, who is an executive producer of the film along with her husband Andy, has been pursuing the case since 2018, and much of the footage and interviews in this doc was recorded in 2018 and 2019.

One of those interviews from seven years ago was with Michael Shaw, who has owned the “main pair” of ruby slippers that Judy Garland wore while playing Dorothy Gale in the classic film. He bought them at an MGM auction in 1970 and has owned them ever since, often bringing them out to display at fan events. In 2005, he lent the shoes to the Judy Garland museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota, for an annual Garland festival the museum holds. After the smash and grab robbery, the slippers stayed missing until 2018, despite the efforts by five different investigators from the Grand Rapids police.

Maria Awes interviews GRPD investigators, as well as the then-director of the Garland Museum. What’s interesting is that so many years have passed since she began looking into who might have stolen the shoes, a few of the people she interviewed in her investigation have since died. The shoes were returned to Shaw in 2024, and they fetched a record amount of money at auction in December of that year.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: In a lot of ways, Ruby Red Handed could be the plot of a season of the series version of Fargo. Maria Awes even mentions Fargo during her narration.

Performance Worth Watching: Michael Shaw is absolutely the star of this film, given how angry he gets during his 2018 interview with Awes. A collector of film memorabilia, the slippers were his prized possession, and even 13 years after the robbery, he found himself getting upset at how slipshod the museum was in protecting the shoes and how inept the GRPD was during the investigation.

Memorable Dialogue: Shaw talks about who he thought might have the shoes, envisioning an obsessed collector “down in a cellar on an altar. He would put on his size 92 blue and white gingham [Dorothy’s dress] and put on artificial braids and go down and light candles in front of the shoes.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: We get why ABC News Studios and Hulu are presenting Ruby Red Handed in one 88-minute chunk instead of two 44-minute episodes. The way the story is structured, there isn’t really a shocking moment or cliffhanger that allowed the Aweses to cut to black midway through. In fact, there is a lot of filler material in the doc that leads us to think that the whole story could have been pretty effectively told in under an hour.

There’s a segment on the legacy of Judy Garland that could have been shorter, and Maria Awes seems to sidetrack viewers with a story about a search warrant that was supposed to be sealed but wasn’t. Yes, it does involve the contact that became the middleman that negotiated the return of the slippers, but the part about it not being sealed speaks more to the ineptitude of local law enforcement and courts than anything else.

Given how angry Michael Shaw still was with the Grand Rapids police in 2018, 13 years after the theft, makes us wonder just how much the department dropped the ball over those years, and why they didn’t call in the FBI until they got the 2017 tip that led to the recovery of the shoes. But we don’t really get those details. Awes decided to make this more of a quirky tale of a small-town robbery of a massively famous piece of memorabilia; while the lighthearted approach isn’t exactly the wrong choice, it leaves out details that would have given the story a bit more depth.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Ruby Red Handed: Stealing America’s Most Famous Pair Of Shoes feels a touch padded, even though it’s only 88 minutes. But it’s still a fun story with a lot of twists and an ending that shows just how the movie memorabilia market has changed since the shoes were first stolen 20 years ago.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.